Twitter case studies: Bad and er… bad

This isn’t a particularly constructive blog post, but I thought I’d share two great examples of bad Twitter use.

The first one I didn’t even bother clicking to view their profile page, because frankly why would I want to having received the notification email pictured left?

I mean, that’s not even trying is it? It’s not even setting up a Twitter stream as an affiliate link farm and pretending to be a real person.

It’s just doing what it says on the tin: Top Affiliate1. Still, I suppose it’s at least ‘authentic’.

The second example of Twitter abue is slightly less forgivable. I received a notification that Coca Cola Zero was following me on Twitter (albeit in Portuguese) so I took a look at their profile thinking how interesting it would be to see what the brand was doing on Twitter.

Amazingly (and presuming it is an official Coke branded site – although I have no reason to think otherwise) the Twitter feed is more or less being used as a spam site. Take a look at the screenshot below:

You should be able to make out that the user is following about 5,000 people (me included despite not speaking Portuguese) while only having 200 followees. Also, although you probably can’t make it out, they have only posted two tweets in over two weeks. That’s a FAIL in my books.

As a footnote, I was in Brazil last week speaking to PR professionals – so I wonder if someone I met works on the Coke Zero account and has added me. If it was – feel free to drop me an email and I’ll tell you where you could improve